it might be of any scale, it might be a huge global network like verizon and deutsche telecoms, it might be the network of a law firm that perhaps, you know, only spans from new york to los angeles. it might be a network like facebook or google. but what's striking and necessary to understand the way it manifests itself physically is that networks carry networks. you might have a global backbone company like a level three or a tata that own the strands of glass and that own the conduits that might run perhaps beside railroad tracks across the country. you might have another company, sort of a mid-sized network services company, one called hurricane electric, that might actually illuminate those strands of glass. they might own the light. ask and then you might have a goldman sachs or large law firm that buys bandwidth on that glass. so it's, you know, we often talk about b the information superhighway as if the network itself were the highway. i hike to think of it more -- i like to think of it more that a given network is a car chugging along the highway side by side with other networks